Malakai's POV
The smell was the first transgression, the primal herald that announced reality had snapped.
It wasn't the sanitized horror of cinema—no dramatic gust of rot, no monstrous stench. Real death, *fresh* death, was insidious. It smelled like warm, wet copper left to weep beneath a hard rainwater. It tasted of old pennies and exposed wire. And as the minutes dragged like iron chains inside the stifling study, that scent, that metallic fog, thickened, slowly swallowing the antique room whole.
Lorenzo's blood had fully reached the intricate border of the 19th-century Persian carpet. The expensive weave wasn't just wet; it was saturated, the fluid sinking in thick, obsidian veins. Above, the grand crystal chandelier, usually a masterpiece of light, caught the dark pool and reflected it back as a jagged, shifting oil slick. Under the dim, amber glow, the blood looked like a creeping patch of living void.
Seven minutes.
Maybe eight.
It was enough time for the biology of the body to commence its grim work.
Lorenzo's olive skin had shed its warmth with terrifying velocity. The color was retreating, leaving behind a hue that was less pale and more the color of wet, gray shale—the shade of existence itself abandoning its host. His lips had initiated the transition to a violent, bruised blue. And his right eye remained half-open, a cloudy, milky marble fixed with unsettling intensity toward the far bookshelf, as if his dead mind was still cataloging a grievance.
The silence inside the office was a living thing, crushing and unbearable.
It wasn't quiet; it was deafening.
And it was because Kiera wouldn't stop moving.
Back and forth. Back and forth.
She was a loaded gun, pacing the length of the room with a hum of kinetic violence beneath her skin. Her heavy tactical boots clicked sharply against the cold marble segments of the floor, a rhythmic countdown. Strands of dark hair clung to her face, plastered there by a cold sweat and a fine, near-invisible mist of blood. Every few seconds, her eyes would dart from the corpse to the entry, to the windows, mentally cataloging, processing, surviving.
*Evidence. Time. Risk. Containment.*
Meanwhile, I sat unmoving on the leather couch, my gaze fixed on the ornate ceiling molding. I could feel the blood drying beneath my fingernails, a tight, stiff sensation.
Most people would have devolved. Panic is the default human setting for murder in one's own sanctuary. It is a tsunami that drowns reason. But panic makes mistakes, and mistakes write sentences in prison.
Yet, this was not normal, not even for a life lived in the shadows.
I had seen men unmade. I had seen bodies vanish into the gray indifference of the Atlantic Ocean. I had seen throats opened with surgical precision in neon-lit alleyways. I had seen torture chambers painted in arterial red by the first light of sunrise.
But Lorenzo dying here? Inside my office? That was a catastrophic violation of protocol.
This was never supposed to become personal. This was business. But the bastard had pushed too far, violated the one boundary I had set. He had brought threats into my home. He had named names that should have been buried in cement. Information that could incinerate years of delicate, dangerous construction.
For one second—one fractured, devastating microsecond—I had stopped thinking logically. I let the rage breathe.
And Lorenzo had paid the invoice.
Kiera stopped pacing abruptly. The click of her boots ceased, dropping the room into sudden, magnified silence. Her gaze fixed on the body again, but it was different now. Not assessing a threat, but seeing a project. There was a faint smear of blood across her cheek. She didn't seem aware of it.
Then—*Knock.*
*Knock.*
*Knock.*
Three slow, measured hits against the thick mahogany study door.
Kiera's head snapped toward the sound. Mine followed slowly, the movement heavy.
Raphael.
"Come in," I said, my voice flat, devoid of infection.
The large brass handle turned cautiously, and the door clicked open. Raphael stepped in first, struggling with two heavily loaded plastic shopping bags, the light from the hallway illuminating a scowl of irritation.
"I swear, if this is another one of your psychotic, zero-dark-thirty 'emergency cleanups,' I am charging a toxic hazard premium," he began, his voice raspy. "Finding half this specific shit without looking suspicious is impossible. The old woman at the pharmacy looked at me like I was building an improvised explosive device, and I had to lie and say my grandmother had a severe case of—"
He stopped.
Completely.
The heavy bags nearly slipped from his white-knuckled grip. His eyes locked onto the mound that was Lorenzo's body. Then the sprawling, inky map of blood. Then me on the couch. Then Kiera, standing in the shadows with blood on her face.
And slowly… his expression twisted, not into terror, but into pure, exhausted disbelief.
"…Oh, hell no."
The room held its breath. Raphael blinked hard, a frantic spasm, as if expecting the hallucination to clear. The corpse remained obstinately present.
"What the fuck happened?" His voice was a forced whisper, tight in his throat.
No one answered immediately. Raphael stepped further into the room, his movements hesitant, precise, practically lifting his feet to avoid tracking the blood that seemed to have no endpoint.
"When did this happen?" He looked around the room, assessing the damage. "Why is there so much… volume? Why is he still *here*? Is that—" His voice cracked slightly on the last word. "Is that *Lorenzo*?"
Kiera crossed her arms, the movement sharp and defining. "Yes."
Raphael turned to me, his eyes wide. "Malakai."
I remained silent, watching him.
His frustration detonated. "Oh, my God, bro. I know you kill people. We ALL know you kill people. That is literally the least shocking information in the world. I don't give a fuck. But how the fuck do you kill somebody INSIDE your own office? This is your *home*, Malakai." His voice was rising, echoing off the mahogany paneling. "You couldn't take him downstairs first? Knock him out? Beat his ass somewhere else? Why *here*?" He pointed aggressively toward the cooling corpse. "And why Lorenzo? Of all the targets, you pick the one with the biggest spotlight?"
I leaned my head back against the couch cushions slowly, my jaw so tight it ached. I wasn't ashamed. I wasn't guilty. I was just profoundly irritated by the logistics.
Lorenzo had crossed a line. And when men crossed lines around me, they became history. It was a simple, absolute equation.
Raphael rubbed both of his hands over his face, hard. "This is bad. This is really, really, *spectacularly* bad."
"Enough."
Kiera's voice sliced through his outburst. It was quiet, but possessed the clean, cold quality of an ice pick.
Instant silence fell. Raphael looked at her. So did I.
In the dim light, she looked terrifyingly calm. This wasn't the calm of emotional numbness, nor was it the coldness of a psychopath. It was focus. It was the state of mind where the brain shoves all fear, all humanity, into a lead-lined box in the subconscious, locking it away and throwing away the key because it is irrelevant to the mission of *survival*.
"What's done is done," she said evenly. "Malakai has a meeting in less than an hour. We either clean this now and make him look like a grieving business partner, or we all become 'unfortunate disappearances' later."
Raphael stared at her for another few seconds. Then, slowly, he let out a long, defeated sigh and lowered the shopping bags to the marble floor. "You know what?" he muttered. "I'm not even gonna ask why you sound so experienced with this specific timeline."
Kiera crouched beside the bags immediately, tearing them open. She began to pull out items, arranging them on a clean area of the floor with clinical precision.
Plastic sheeting. Gallons of heavy bleach. Thick, industrial-grade black rubber gloves. A pair of sharp, heavy-duty gardening shears. Several syringes. Bottled, clear chemicals. Heavy tape. Perfume and cutters.
Every item she pulled out made Raphael look increasingly sickened.
"Okay," he said carefully, "I couldn't get the blowtorch. Apparently, 'civilized society' frowns upon purchasing industrial welding equipment at midnight. So I got a windproof lighter instead."
Kiera nodded once, not breaking her task. "That'll work."
Raphael blinked. "…That'll work?"
She ignored him completely. Watching her now felt bizarre, almost hallucinogenic. She moved differently. There was a confidence in her posture, a latent dangerous energy that was usually coiled tight. It was as if something hidden deep inside her—the thing she kept masked to appear harmless—had finally decided it was done pretending.
She slipped on the black rubber gloves slowly, the sound of the elastic snapping against her wrists loud in the silent room, before turning toward Lorenzo's body.
"If this body is ever discovered," she said calmly, looking at me, "they'll identify him through DNA first. The technology is too good now." She crouched beside the corpse. "Nails. Hair follicles. Skin cells under the nails if he struggled, which I see he didn't. Teeth."
Her eyes seemed to darken, catching the light like a deep well. "So, we make identification difficult. We destroy the forensic roadmap."
Then she reached for the gardening shears.
Raphael's frown intensified. "…Kiera?"
She grabbed Lorenzo's left hand, turning it palm-up. And without hesitation, she set the shears against his index finger and squeezed.
*Crunch.*
The sound of shears severing bone and sinew was wet and shockingly loud. It was a sound that didn't belong in a civilized study, and it echoed off the walls.
Raphael recoiled, physically dropping back a step. "Oh, *fuck*."
Another *crunch*. Another. She didn't rush. She wasn't manic. She was just working through a process. One by one, digits dropped onto the plastic sheeting. Blood, now thick and beginning to coagulate, smeared across the black gloves.
I couldn't look away. It was a scene of visceral horror, yet I was paralyzed, not by the gore, but by the utter composed nature of her work.
Most people break eventually. The mind cannot process that much violence without rebelling. Their breathing would hitch, their hands would shake, their stomach would turn. But Kiera?
Nothing. Her breathing remained rhythmic. Her hands were as steady as a surgeon's. She looked horrifyingly composed while dismantling a corpse, treating the task like a complex math equation she had rehearsed.
Raphael turned his back on the scene, hand over his mouth. "I'm gonna vomit. I swear to god."
"Don't," Kiera replied casually, moving to the right hand. "That creates another biological variable, more clean up."
Raphael stared at her over his shoulder in disbelief. "How are you saying that? How are you saying that so calmly?"
*Crunch.* Another finger dropped.
"I like biology," she said matter-of-factly, the shears moving again. "And I love watching crime scenes unveiling amd autopsies …" She trailing off, her silence louder than the words.
*Crunch.*
"And I find decomposition studies fascinating. The science of unmaking is just as complex as the science of making."
Raphael looked ready to pass out. "What kind of possessed, serial-killer-origin-story answer is that?"
Kiera ignored him again. She moved to Lorenzo's feet. He was wearing expensive Italian loafers, which she slid off with jarring ease before setting to work on the toes.
The shears worked with a sickening, wet snapping sound through bone and tissue. Lorenzo's expensive silk socks were instantly saturated in dark red. The smell in the room worsened exponentially.
The metallic copper scent was now joined by the primal, thick odor of exposed tissue and the sharp sting of fresh, spilling blood. The air thickened until breathing felt like swallowing sludge.
And yet… somehow, in that scene of utter violation… she still looked beautiful.
That was the most distributing part. The core of the horror. Blood on her gloves, her cheek. A corpse at her knees. The room lit in the colors of old blood and amber decay.
Yet, she looked more alive, more *awake*, than anyone else I had ever known. She was a debt—a girl dragged into my world through desperation and circumstance, a stray I had taken in. But watching her now, Methodically unmaking a man… she didn't look like a victim of my world. She looked like she was its apex predator. She finished the fingers and toes.
"Next up...teeth." She said effortlessly. She began pulling out all the teeth. One by one.
I wasn't too bothered because I'm used to knocking out people's teeth with just a punch. Meanwhile , Raphael looked horrified. And sick
When she finally finished the last teeth, she reached for the syringes, her black gloves now slick with gore. She uncapped one with her teeth, spitting the plastic cap onto the blood-soaked carpet.
"Sodium hydroxide," she explained to no one, holding the needle up to the light to check for air bubbles.
Raphael stared at her, horrified. "Why do you know chemical names? You don't just know that off the top of your head!"
"It helps dissolve tissue faster," she said, her voice clinical. "Specifically, it saponifies fats. It breaks down the lipid barrier that protects cells."
She bent over the body. "If they can't find his DNA on the outside, they'll look for traces in the throat, lungs, stomach."
Then she stabbed the long needle directly into Lorenzo's neck, pushing it deep into his trachea.
Raphael gagged violently, a loud, wet sound. "Oh, nah. I can't. I'm done."
Kiera pushed the plunger down slowly, methodically. She reached for another syringe. She repeated the process.
Stomach. Chest. Arms. Legs. The body was being filled with a chemical agent that would accelerate its decomposition, turning it into slush from the inside out.
Every single injection was methodical. Precise. Professional. There was no hesitation, no emotion. Just efficiency.
I watched silently while darker, colder thoughts spiraled through my head. Who exactly was Kiera before she arrived in my world? Who was she before she was a debt to be collected?
Because normal girls did not adapt like this. Normal girls cried. Normal girls panicked. Normal girls collapsed under the weight of witnessing a murder.
Kiera escalated. She didn't just accept the horror; she masterclassed it.
Then she reached for the lighter and the bottle of perfume.
I finally spoke, my voice cutting through the heavy air. "What are you planning now?"
She picked up the expensive glass bottle. Raphael frowned. "…u wanna make the dead body smell better or what?"
Kiera flicked the windproof lighter alive. A small, orange flame danced upward, casting stark shadows across her face.
Then she sprayed the perfume toward the flame.
*FWOOSH.*
A weak, short stream of fire brushed across Lorenzo's cheek. The alcohol in the perfume ignited, leaving a superficial singe mark before dying. Kiera stared at the small burn, her expression darkening with impatience. She looked annoyed.
Then suddenly—*"Fuck it."*
Before either of us could even process her intention, she grabbed the glass bottle, twisted the spray cap off entirely, and in one fluid motion, tilted it back and poured a large, burning mouthful of the alcohol-heavy perfume straight between her lips.
Raphael nearly screamed, his hands flying to his head. "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?! ARE YOU TRYING TO KILL YOURSELF?!"
Even I stood up slightly from the couch, my pulse finally kicking. "Kiera."
She ignored us both. She didn't swallow. She held the burning liquid in her mouth, her cheeks slightly distended.
The lighter glowed in her hand, the only stable source of light in the dim room. Perfume sat inside her mouth, the heavy, sweet scent warring with the smell of death.
Then—she blew.
*FWOOOOOOOOSH.*
A massive, violent wall of pure, blue-orange fire erupted violently from her mouth. It was a localized firestorm.
Raphael stumbled backward so hard he slammed into the oak bookshelf, books raining down around him.
The flames devoured Lorenzo instantly. Hair curled and blackened to ash. Skin blistered and split in microseconds under the intense heat.
The smell hit seconds later—the sweet, cloying, utterly unforgettable odor of burning human flesh, mixed with the artificial sweetness of the floral perfume.
The intense, localized fire illuminated Kiera's face in violent, shifting orange light. She looked insane. Not emotional insanity—visual, feral insanity. Like some ancient, dark myth, a fury dragged out of the deepest pit of darkness. Smoke began to climb toward the high ceiling like escaping ghosts, thickening the air with a choking haze.
And she kept going.
She turned to face the body from a different angle, the lighter ready.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Controlled bursts of fire left her mouth, burning away Lorenzo's facial features, destroying the hair follicles, melting the skin. With every burst, his face became unrecognizable beneath the flames, a charred mask of ash and melted tissue.
She didn't flinch at the heat. She didn't recoil from the smell. She was entirely focused on the complete eradication of Lorenzo's identity.
And for the first time in years—for the first time since I was a child—I felt unsettled.
It wasn't the corpse. It was her. Because looking into her eyes as they reflected the flames she had created, I saw no fear. I saw only focus. I saw calculation. I saw a singular obsession with survival that I had only ever seen in the mirror.
Eventually, the flames died, reduced to small embers in the blood-soaked carpet before the plastic sheet was thrown over him. Smoke lingered heavily across the office, clinging to everything. Lorenzo barely looked human anymore; he was a charred, mutilated effigy of the man he had been.
Kiera wiped her mouth slowly with the back of her wrist, her gloved hand leaving a smear of char and blood across her face. She looked at us both, her eyes calm and cold.
"Garbage bags. Now."
Raphael stared at her like she was the devil herself, his jaw hanging open. "I'm officially never arguing with you. About anything. Ever."
She didn't even smile.
We wrapped Lorenzo's burned, chemicals-and-guts-saturated body in layers of thick plastic, then in the very Persian rug his blood had ruined. His charred limbs bent unnaturally, snapping faintly within the carpet. Dead weight was always heavier than expected—it felt like bodies actively refused to leave the world quietly, pulling toward the ground.
Raphael and I dragged the massive bundle downstairs, the rug thumping heavily on every wooden step, moving toward the garage. Kiera stayed behind, the immediate work of the cleanup already underway, scrubbing the floors with industrial bleach.
Halfway down the main stairs, Raphael stopped, taking a jagged breath. He looked over at me, his face pale.
"Bro…"
I stayed silent, my hand tightening on the rug.
"I think your debt might actually be a fucking supervillain."
Despite everything—the dead man, the blood, the fire—I almost laughed. It was the only response.
"She cut fingers off like she was slicing vegetables for dinner," he continued nervously, his voice shaking. "And the fire thing? The fire thing was next level. What if she accidentally blew her damn face off? Did you see her eyes?"
I didn't answer him. Because truthfully… part of my mind couldn't stop replaying the image. Kiera, standing over the corpse of a man she knew I had just killed, breathing fire into the darkness, burning him from the face of the earth.
She was beautiful. She was deadly. And she was completely, utterly unafraid.
And that intruiged me more than anything else today.